


Scars

by Belphegor



Series: Carnahan-O'Connells musings and snapshots [5]
Category: The Mummy (1999), The Mummy Returns (2001), The Mummy Series
Genre: Family, Gen, musings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-05
Updated: 2020-02-05
Packaged: 2021-02-28 03:42:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,018
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22577254
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Belphegor/pseuds/Belphegor
Summary: Life leaves traces on people: some good, some bad, some a little bit of both. Sometimes it leaves reminders on your skin.(Rick, Evy, Jonathan, and Alex all have their own kinds of reminders.)
Series: Carnahan-O'Connells musings and snapshots [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1557865
Comments: 5
Kudos: 43





	Scars

Rick, unsurprisingly, has a lot of scars.

Perhaps the most surprising are the small twin marks on either side of his skull, hidden by his hair, that come from the doctor’s forceps the day he was born. (He was a big newborn.) He managed to mostly avoid injury during his days of traipsing across North Africa with Izzy – who, to his eternal chagrin, absolutely didn’t – but carries a long thin line on his right side along the ribs from his first battle in the Foreign Legion, courtesy of a Tuareg sabre.

Most of his other scars are smaller – souvenirs of little wounds and scratches from the orphanage or his two encounters with the undead. At this point he’s forgotten where half of them come from. His scars don’t have a history for him; his body doesn’t show traces of the things that left the biggest, deepest marks on his soul, for good or bad. If it did, then memories like his parents’ deaths, or losing Evy then getting her back, would probably mean more scar tissue than he even has skin.

* * *

Whoever said that librarians don’t live dangerously hasn’t met Evy. Her hands are long and graceful, but if you look closer you can see her fingers have countless little scrapes from digging tools, rocks, and paper cuts.

When she was six she tried to stand on a stool on top of a chair to reach a book on the “forbidden” top shelf, and ended up tumbling to the floor with a 600-page book landing hard on her head. She got nine stitches and Jonathan made her promise to leave pilfering forbidden things to him (on the basis that he was taller and could reach that particular shelf with just a chair).

She also has a small thin scar on the underside of her chin from when she was ten and played at being a Priestess of Isis – she’d tied a sheet around her to make a proper ceremonial dress and tripped on it walking down the stairs. It was a small cut, but it bled a lot, and to this day there’s a dark spot on the wooden floor where the maid couldn’t quite get the stain off. Evelyn doesn’t mind: it feels like she and the house share a scar of their own.

Her death and resurrection left a mark on her stomach: a short white line, rather thick, which came into being looking as faded as any of her old scars. Nobody gets to see this particular scar but her and Rick and it suits her just fine. If she ever feels in need of a reminder of her own mortality and how much being alive is a miracle, she only has to run her fingers on that particular spot just above her navel, where the skin is rougher. She hardly ever does, though. Things like the sun on her face and the wind in her hair, or the feel of her husband’s skin or her son in her arms, her brother’s hand at the crook of her elbow, are more than enough.

* * *

For someone who takes pride in avoiding danger at all costs and being able to talk himself out of any fight, Jonathan didn’t get through life unscathed. He got into a number of scrapes in Eton and later Oxford, some of them his own fault, some others not really; when he took up boxing he got his knuckles split open a few times. It was so long ago that the skin has mostly grown back by now, the scar tissue so faint you’d hardly know it was there without a closer look.

There’s a jagged scar on his outer right thigh from a German bullet, the only physical reminder of his stint in the trenches. When Anck-su-namun slashed at him with her trident thing in Ahm Shere, the wound wasn’t deep and he didn’t really have time to register the pain at the moment, but it stung like the bloody blazes afterwards and the scar took a long time to fade from red to white.

The most impressive one, though, is the souvenir from picking up that shiny scarab in Hamunaptra: the craggy white scar in his left palm, the cleaner but longer crescent on his shoulder, and the thin trail of raised skin that goes all the way from one scar to the other. Alex finds it quite impressive; Jonathan is rather self-conscious about it. It’s the reason he tends to favour long sleeves now, because it’s simpler than explaining it away as an old war wound. Fortunately, he’s a 40-something Englishman in 1930s England; the Great War is the go-to explanation for weird scars you don’t want to talk about. Such is the power of politeness: it makes people prefer to pretend not to see anything rather than make a potential faux pas.

* * *

Alex is passionate and has a tendency to dive head-first into things, so it’s not surprising that he has scars, too. He scraped his knees so often the skin there is perpetually thinner and lighter than the rest of him; there’s a couple of dents in his shin where pebbles gouged into his leg during a memorable bicycle lesson on the driveway.

He once got his arm broken when he and his mates climbed over the school wall on a dare, but it didn’t leave a mark, which he’s kind of disappointed about, because it hurt a _lot_.

There is one scar Alex is proud of, though, and that’s a nick on his right ear he got defending his mate Edgar who was getting bullied by Will Forsythe and his gang. It bled a great deal, so his parents got scared and lectured him, but afterwards his mum and dad hugged him and said they were proud, and then his uncle bought him and Edgar chocolate ice cream.

Sometimes scars mean good memories, or they’re the reminders of good things, even if they didn’t really feel good at the time. Alex is glad to have one like that.

Not that he’s looking forward to having more, though.


End file.
